State of the nation

That's causing deprivation.

Current status...

Took the modular out of the telecom rack, where it looked like a decorated rendition of Kubrick's monolith, and placed it into two SKB pop up racks I had laying around. Power modules and supply are affixed to the insides with screws and washers. (Battery powered drills are handy, especially when free.) The walls of the cases are quite robust, so I don't anticipate any problems.

Gear rearrangement in itself is nothing new, but I did something else today that has been the first new anti-intertial activity in quite a while -- I ordered some kits from Synthesis Technology. Not an amazing feat considering it doesn't take much to type in some numbers and hit 'order', except that I didn't know kits were still available. Luckily, Matrix and TJ, a MOTM-centric blogger, relayed the information out into the cyber on account of there being a 10%-off sale. Gonna have to get some Synthesizers.com blanks for mounting; will be a good chance to try out methods for front-panel artwork. Don't think I really wanna deal with silkscreening so we'll see how the modelical method works.

First kit is the MOTM-120 (4x) sub-octave generator. Simple idea really, just some 4-bit counter ICs which generate something approaching a small army of square waves, but they've included a potentially interesting function that ring mods A and B inputs. Four bits by four bits equals the all important sixteen. Techno serendipity. The sub octs get multiplexed in, going deeper and deeper as the sixteen steps unfold. To use the most annoying word ever invented, I'm curious to see how texturally stable the effect can be made by mitigating the lower frequencies with the Synthesizers.com Q107 SVF HPF. Highspeed B-signal testing will also be a must.

Second kit is the MOTM-380 quad LFO in a one-space unit. Kind of plain, and definitely not as cool as the dual Oakley Little LFO + MFOS offsetters module I cobbled together, but you really can't argue with the single-space footprint, plus the self-mixing of these MOTM LFOs is an interesting feature with alot of potential for cheaply attaining non-symmetric (in the short-term time domain) waveforms. Er, one more thing, the LFOs are free running so there's no syncing (i.e., for trigging of envelope generators), and for that matter, no square waves. Rectifying will produce some useful shapes to be sure, and the potential for using the LFOs in lazy evolution duties will be fine (no pun intended). Did I mention it's only 1 space wide?

So, that's the news on the gear front. It's a battle I'd burnt out on, since the social payoff has completely waned, but whatever -- ultimately, the goal is to create a two hour mix on-the-fly. No rest for the weary, and frankly I'm hungry for it. After not doing anything creative for the past four months I'm chomping at the bit to get the whole System of Systems running again.